This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.

People have habits about what they think songs should be like. There's the folky thing of: "Poor me, I'm a sensitive person in a cruel world." Or the pop thing of: "Hey, look at me, I'm sexy."

The missing links in my life's work, no less!

We've all got to earn a living. And writing songs is what I do. But when I've done a record, it's not that I think it's better or worse than anyone else's, but if I think that nobody else would have done it if I hadn't, well then that's ok.

People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.

I get slightly irritated by people who say they're natural rebels because it just means that they're going to be against whatever anybody does, which is almost like saying you might as well leave it as it is. I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law. I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.

When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice.